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Dr. David Clarke - Operation Mainbrace UFOs
592 Plays2 years ago
Dr David Clarke is one of the UK's leading authorities on contemporary legend and folklore. He is a co-founder of the Contemporary Legend research group at SHU and combines his interests in folklore with his teaching and research in journalism and media law. He is an experienced broadcaster and has acted as a consultant for The National Archives and the BBC.
1952 marked a turning point in terms of the British Government’s interest in the UFO enigma. In the previous year the final report of the Flying Saucer Working Party had recommended that no further investigations of aerial phenomena should be undertaken by the MoD “until some material evidence becomes available.”
David's Blog on Operation Mainbrace UFOs - https://drdavidclarke.co.uk/secret-fi...
Interviews with Michael Swiney - https://drive.google.com/drive/folder...
David Twitter: https://twitter.com/shuclarke
David blog: https://drdavidclarke.co.uk/
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1952 marked a turning point in terms of the British Government’s interest in the UFO enigma. In the previous year the final report of the Flying Saucer Working Party had recommended that no further investigations of aerial phenomena should be undertaken by the MoD “until some material evidence becomes available.”
David's Blog on Operation Mainbrace UFOs - https://drdavidclarke.co.uk/secret-fi...
Interviews with Michael Swiney - https://drive.google.com/drive/folder...
David Twitter: https://twitter.com/shuclarke
David blog: https://drdavidclarke.co.uk/
!! SUPPORT DISCLOSURE TEAM !!
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/disclosureteam
Buy me a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/disclosu...
Disclosure Team Merch: https://disclosureteam.bigcartel.com/
Disclosure Team Instagram:
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Transcript
Introduction and Format
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Anomalous Podcast Network. Multiple voices, one phenomenon.
00:00:30
Speaker
Welcome back, everybody. It is great to be here for another show. It's good to see everybody in the live chat. Please keep the conversation polite and cordial, as you always do. I really appreciate that. It just helps for everything running smoothly. If you do have any questions throughout the show, please pop them in capital letters. I'm more likely to then see them, and I will try and ask them when it's relevant to the conversation.
Setting the Stage: Classic UFO Cases
00:00:58
Speaker
We are going to be covering some classic sort of older cases here today. So yeah, I think that's everything. Let's get started. I'm going to welcome my guest who's now a regular.
Guest Introduction: Dr. David Clark
00:01:11
Speaker
As always, please welcome Dr. David Clark. David, how are you? I'm fine, thank you. Here we are again. Oh yes. We're here to talk about a different case again, which is always good.
1952: A Year of Global Tensions
00:01:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:01:24
Speaker
So it's September. So we're actually in the month celebrating 70 years of the kind of stuff we're going to be talking about today. So I think let's just start at the start of that kind of year and what happened. And if you can give us some context to how it all came about and the implications, that'd be great. Yeah. Well, as you know, 70 years anniversary of the classic case, the top case that we're going to be talking about tonight.
00:01:53
Speaker
Just to sort of set the general context, I mean given what's happened with the death of Queen Elizabeth II last week, it was a similar situation back then because 70 years ago her father George VI had died, I think it was in March 1952, so she'd become Queen
00:02:12
Speaker
even though she wasn't crowned until the following year. So there was all that going on. There was also the sort of, we've got a new Cold War now that's going on with Russia having invaded Ukraine, but back then, 1952, 1953, it was right at the height of the original Cold War tension. And, you know, it was, if you read the papers and the media at the time,
00:02:36
Speaker
There were similar levels of anxiety, there were similar sorts of worries about nuclear war kicking off and don't forget this was only seven years after the end of the Second World War and there was an awful lot of people who were still enrolled in the military services, there was still national service, my father was in the Navy at the time
Operation Mainbrace and Cold War Sightings
00:02:58
Speaker
people were still doing like they what they had to do for national service there were huge amount of aircraft flying around in the skies military aircraft exercises and operation main brace i've seen it described as operation main brace and exercise main brace i'm not sure which is the correct one but what that was was like this massive nato exercise to simulate a soviet attack
00:03:25
Speaker
on western europe and it was primarily a sort of um a naval exercise so you had i think there was i've got the actual um original press release somewhere here in my pile oh here we go yeah press announcement a large-scale exercise will be conducted on europe's northern flank this autumn with ships planes and men of nations of the north atlantic treaty organization participating so it was a 13 day exercise codename main brace it began on september the third
00:03:54
Speaker
And there were more than 150 warships, hundreds of aircraft taking part, anti-submarine, convoy operations, military forces of Canada, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, United Kingdom, and United States all participating. So you can imagine a huge buildup to what was going on. And as I say,
00:04:20
Speaker
setting it in the context of the UFO phenomenon. Earlier in the year the United States Air Force had rekindled or reignited their UFO investigation which had become Project Blue Book and that was as a result of a really big wave
The Topcliffe UFO Incident
00:04:37
Speaker
of sightings. There were literally reports from all over the globe many sort of military incidents during the summer
00:04:44
Speaker
June and July, they'd been the massive flap over Washington, D.C. that probably most people here will know about or have come across, either in books or online. You know, there was there was F-18 scrambled to intercept objects that had been seen on radar over the American capital.
00:05:05
Speaker
Both close encounters reported by military pilots. And this became such a huge thing that there was a massive press conference at Washington, one of the biggest since the end of the Second World War, where Colonel, I think George Samford had to go on TV and sort of explain what the US authorities were doing. CIA got interested for the first time properly.
00:05:32
Speaker
and started looking at the whole subject from the point of view of psychological warfare and all the reports that had been in the media about this got our Prime Minister at that time, Winston Churchill, interested in the subject and he fired off that famous memo to the Air Ministry basically saying what's all this stuff about flying saucers?
00:05:51
Speaker
you know, tell me the truth. And he was given a summary of this study that had been done in 1950, the flying saucer working party, which we will return to the look at some military sightings, including a very interesting sighting by a guy called Stan Hubbard, who was one of the RAS top test pilots who I got to interview 20 years ago. And he told this amazing story about
00:06:15
Speaker
a really close sighting of a UFO that he'd had at Farnborough Airfield in 1950. That's that stamp in the cockpit of one of his planes and I think he, I remember him telling me that the day he saw this, or the day before he'd seen this thing, he'd flown a German Faisalist Storch, which those of you who are sort of aircraft enthusiasts may remember, it's a famous sort of, it's a plane, iconic German plane from the Second World War, it's one of the
00:06:45
Speaker
planes that we captured from the Germans and he was one of the test pilots who were involved in basically deconstructing and finding out what the Germans had after the war. So we'll talk about his sighting and all this is building up to September the 19th, 20th, 1952, which is when exercise main brace was underway. There were all these ships
00:07:09
Speaker
In the North Atlantic there were an air crew moving around to all different bases and the other interesting thing was it was also the 12th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, so Lots and lots of RAF planes out doing aerobatics and demonstrations over various airfields in England and Wales so a lot going on in the sky and then
00:07:34
Speaker
Our friends, the UFOs, decided to put in a. So I suppose it's best to start off with the top cliff case itself then. So yeah.
00:07:47
Speaker
Where's the best place to start? I mean, there is a lot of intricacies to the case itself. So, you know, I've got some documents and images to show. So if at any point they become relevant, just let me know and I'll pop them on screen. Yeah. Well, let's have the document where Flight Lieutenant Kilburn, John Kilburn, who's the key witness
00:08:09
Speaker
Unfortunately, John had passed away before I got, before I started doing these investigations. I mean, I tried to track him down around the year 2000, about 22 years ago, and I think he'd recently died. I contacted, I spoke to a member of his family and it was like, oh, I wish he'd rung.
00:08:26
Speaker
five years ago, you could have told you the whole story. So he's like one of the few people I wasn't able to interview. But his statement, which we'll see now, was that the two six nine squadron, two six nine squadron. Yeah, he was. He was in the RAF in the Second World War, and he was in number two six nine squadron, which was a Shackleton squadron. And one of these aircraft that they use for early warning.
00:08:54
Speaker
that were part of the exercise. And there was a whole bunch of men from that squadron, 269, who were normally based at RAF Bally Kelly in Northern Ireland, and they'd flown to Yorkshire for main brace. And they were actually on the ground. I don't know what they were doing. They were waiting to be sort of scrambled or take off in the Shackletons. And nice clear days, a bit like the weather we've had over the last few weeks before it turned.
00:09:23
Speaker
um clear skies um and i don't think it was kilburn he actually said i'm probably best reading you what he says this is the statement he made to the air ministry which is one of the few um bits of um ufo reporting from the raf that's actually survived um over the years and he i love this because it's written in you know that old-fashioned language that people used to speak in the 1950s when they were making an official report i have the honor
00:09:53
Speaker
to report the following incident which I witnessed on Friday the 19th of September. Now I understand from some of the other sources because there's a signal as well that we'll look at. This was around just before 11 o'clock in the morning and he was standing with four of his colleagues from number 269 Squadron on the
00:10:18
Speaker
I think outside the control tower, RAF Topcliffe, which is a World War II station in North Yorkshire, not far from the A1. I was on holiday in North Yorkshire a few weeks ago and I drove right past it. I think it's still used for training. RAF Cadets
CIA's Role and Psychological Warfare
00:10:37
Speaker
still use it.
00:10:38
Speaker
Anyway, it was very different in 1952. You can imagine there'd be aircraft all over the runway, lots of people in uniform everywhere waiting for some kind of call to take part in this operation. So he was standing there, he was looking at the sky, and they were actually watching a meteor jet that was descending towards not Topcliffe, but Dishforth, which is another aerodrome not far away, probably no more than two or three miles away.
00:11:08
Speaker
And he says in his statement that the meteor was approximately 5,000 feet and approaching from the east. Flight Lieutenant Paris, who is another one of the key witnesses who were there with him, it was him who actually noticed a white object in the sky at a height between 10 and 20,000 feet, some five miles astern of the meteor, so something much higher
00:11:31
Speaker
in the sky brilliant white in colour initially. It then appeared to be silver and circular as they watched it and it was travelling at a much slower speed than the meteor but on a similar course. So he says in his statement it maintained the slow forward speed for a few seconds before it began to descend and this is the interesting bit because it descended in the classic sort of you know like a sycamore leaf falling from a tree not like any normal aircraft would behave like a falling leaf
00:12:01
Speaker
motion and at first when they saw it they thought it was something that had come and separated from the meteor you know like a piece of cowling from the engine or something like that or like some sort of exhaust you know maybe the engine was on fire and it sent out like some kind of a cloud of vapor or something like that so initially they thought they were looking at possibly the beginning of an aircraft accident which is why it took on such an importance
00:12:28
Speaker
So they thought at first it was a parachute or engine cowling that had come off the meteor. As the meteor turned toward Dishforth, the object, whilst continuing its descent, appeared to follow suit. And then, this is when they realized this was something totally unlike anything they'd ever seen before. After a few seconds, the object stopped its pendulous motion and its descent and began to rotate, so it started spinning round.
00:12:55
Speaker
on its own axis suddenly it accelerated at an incredible speed towards the west turning onto a southeast of the heading before disappearing and he says that all of this happened in a matter of 15 to 20 seconds and the movements of the object were not identifiable with anything I have seen in the air and the rate of acceleration was unbelievable so it just zoomed off at some incredible speed so this whole bunch of
00:13:21
Speaker
airmen who were on the ground also it so a group of about 10 people including some non-commissioned officers and he said the weather conditions at the time were clear skies sunshine unlimited visibility so really good clear report from a number of different military witnesses from 269 squadron so there's another document i think you might need to move on to get to that which is the signal that went out
00:13:52
Speaker
That's the Air Ministry one. The Air Ministry signal. These are the few bits of paper that have survived in the National Archives about this case. This is the one. This is a really good piece of archive material. So this is a signal that went out from one of the NATO commands copied to Air Ministry in London. And one of the key things, if you can see the bottom,
00:14:16
Speaker
is who it was copied to assistant chief of air staff ops assistant chief of air staff intelligence to copies um and right at the bottom you see head of head of um ministry of defense for dsi now dsi is that is the defense um the the scientific intelligence section of the ministry of defense so they effectively were the forerunners
00:14:44
Speaker
of what became DI-55, as everyone will know, were the people who were involved in active UFO investigations from the 1960s onwards. So this is the beginning of it all, folks. This is 17 years ago. And the interesting, you see that little scribble in the bottom right-hand corner. This is something that's been written on the signal saying, operations, air defense,
00:15:12
Speaker
Ask PA, which is like private assistant, effectively a secretary, an open folder, unidentified aircraft or objects reported to Air Ministry. Now, that suggests that before this happened, they didn't even have an active folder or file for the occurrences of this kind. And Ralph Noyes, who was the he was the he was the private secretary for the vice chief of air stuff, Ralph Cochran,
00:15:42
Speaker
at the time, again, who I interviewed in the 1990s when he was alive. He remembered seeing this signal, because he was really high up in the M.O.D. I mean, this is a guy who was talking about UFOs and the M.O.D. long before anyone else, Ralph Noyes, it's sad that he's no longer with us, but he remembered being at quite a senior position in the Air Ministry at the time and seeing this signal come through and seeing the consternation
00:16:11
Speaker
it caused in the high echelons of the Royal Air Force. I mean, the words he used was, oh my God, our chaps are seeing these things now, not just the Americans. So this is why I think this case or this series of sightings, because it wasn't just top with, there were others as well, it's really what got the Royal Air Force, the Ministry of Defense and Scientific Intelligence
00:16:38
Speaker
Interested in this subject and it's effectively 70 years ago this week. Yeah, it's pretty amazing So I'll take that off I Just wanted to highlight Mr. Ralph noise because we do have an old photograph of him. Yeah, there he is
00:17:01
Speaker
Yeah, there's Ralph. Yeah. So he got to a really senior assistant principal, which is very sort of senior position in the MOD. And he was at one time, I think it was the late 1960s and early 1970s, the head of DS8. Now DS8 is what became the secretariat air stuff, i.e. the UFO desk.
00:17:28
Speaker
He actually ran DS-8 for a period of about five years. He got to see all the top-secret material. And I remember interviewing him in, I think it was 1989 or 1990, this is when I first got involved in ufology. And one of the things he told us about at that time, which we've never been able to get to the bottom of, is that he remembered being taken to the underground cinema in the Ministry of Defence main building at some point during his time at DS-8.
00:17:57
Speaker
where he was shown gun camera film taken by RAF pilots of UFOs, the things that couldn't be identified. You know, people will have seen all the American US Navy films, but he said that he'd seen films in the late 1960s, early 1970s taken by RAF pilots during the 1950s of similar things, very similar, you know, blobs of light moving at incredible speeds, ball shaped objects exploding and retracting, that kind of thing.
00:18:26
Speaker
And there's actually letters from Ralph in the Ministry of Defense files, you know, the ones that were released at the National Archives. After he'd retired, he wrote in when he got, he got personally interested in UFOs when he retired and he wrote a fictional book based upon the Rendlesham Forest incident. And he actually wrote in and said, what happened to those gun camera films that I saw? And like no one could, no one knew because presumably being destroyed in the way that they destroyed everything else.
00:18:56
Speaker
Whether any of those films were from that period, the top clip case, we don't know, but it was certainly from the 1950s. It's frustrating when you hear things like that because we both know just how often we come across
00:19:12
Speaker
cases and you try and get the documents and it's either know they've been destroyed. No, we can't find them or some other boilerplate excuse. Yeah. I mean, I can in some ways, I can understand why film like gun camera film might not have survived because like radar film, it's extremely delicate. It decays.
00:19:34
Speaker
It's so expensive that they recycle it, they reuse it. But the gun camera thing, just for those who don't know what it is, is they used it in the war.
RAF Pilots and Personal Accounts
00:19:44
Speaker
When you see this classic footage of Spitfire shooting down Messerschmitts, that footage was taken by gun cameras, which are cameras in the fuselage of the fighter aircraft. Like when you fire the machine guns, you're firing like a gun.
00:20:00
Speaker
that takes images of what is immediately in front of the aircraft. So there is some stuff from the Cold War intercepting Russian aircraft, and some of it has survived and gone to the Imperial War Museum. But what happened to the UFO films? I've no idea. But they obviously did exist. No doubt that Ralph was telling the truth about what he saw. Wow. If only we had access to something like that.
00:20:29
Speaker
Certainly change the way we look at certain things, especially here in the uk when it comes to the historical aspects of the the phenomena so Um, yes moving on i've now got a document here, which I believe Is this the cia one? Oh h marshall chadwell? Yeah, this is this is um, I think when you put this on twitter a few weeks ago people would sort of say oh that's new and
00:20:54
Speaker
They wouldn't have seen this before. It's fascinating. Some points in that are really fascinating and I hadn't seen it before and then I realized where it had come from when you said so. Yeah, well people don't have much success. Do they get material out of the CIA about UFOs? I did have a bit of success about 20 years ago because I was talking to at that time
00:21:19
Speaker
I was in correspondence with Gerald Haynes, who some of you may, if you might be aware, he wrote quite a lengthy article for a journal called Studies in Intelligence, all about the American intelligence interest in UFOs. And he mentions a couple of doctors in Britain, and one of them was this one.
00:21:43
Speaker
So I actually got in correspondence with him. And he said, it's never been released. Why don't you put in a Freedom of Information request for it? So I did. And amazingly, they sent it to me. As you can see, there's a few things that have been redacted. But he's basically, this is a summary for the CIA of what the Brits were getting up to in the field of UFOs. And it's written in December.
00:22:11
Speaker
1952 so about three months after the top cliff incident and it seems to be based upon a traveler who he doesn't identify as presumably an intelligence officer from the RAF or the Ministry of Defense who was and visited America and it's sort of almost like second hand and I just think the key the key the key lines here is he says the British have a standing committee created about 16 months ago on flying saucers
00:22:41
Speaker
And presumably, this is now under Dr. Jones. Dr. Jones is the well-known, what was known as one of Churchill's wizards, Reginald Victor Jones, who was the head of scientific intelligence during the Second World War, head of the Air Ministry of Scientific Intelligence. And he was all through his life interested in UFOs and flying sources.
00:23:03
Speaker
And he was left the MOD after the Second World War, but Churchill persuaded him to come back and he was in that role, head of the DSI. If you remember the signal we saw about Topcliffe, DSI was the body who investigated the Topcliffe incident. So Harvey Jones would have known about it. He would have been in charge of that investigation.
00:23:27
Speaker
Interestingly enough, although we're told that after that flying source of working party had concluded its work, that that was the end of it. There was no further interest. This seems to suggest otherwise that it set up a standing committee in the DSI straight away afterwards and that R.V. Jones was now head of that.
00:23:47
Speaker
And it says the RAF are action people. The group have concluded that the observations are not enemy aircraft and that none have been over. Fill in the blank. I can only assume that Britain. But then it says, and this is the interesting bit, which links to top cliff.
00:24:05
Speaker
The activity has been quiet and normal up to about 10 to 12 days ago, and I think that is just an error. I think he means two or three months ago, at which time the Yorkshire incident took place. In some RAF field there was some sort of demonstration to which high officials of the RAF in London had been invited. During the show
00:24:27
Speaker
A perfect flying saucer was seen by these officials as well as RAF pilots. So many people saw it that many articles appeared in the public press. That to me is what proves it's got to be Topcliffe because it was only the Topcliffe incident that made all the news headlines and we can show you some of those. And this has upset Jones because he realizes that the creation of the correction of public opinion is part of his responsibilities.
00:24:54
Speaker
So here we get into the sort of the CIA's psychological warfare interest. They were upset that the people, including RAF pilots, were talking about flying saucers because it was something they didn't want them to talk about. So we've got to get through the bumps as quickly as possible. So yeah, I mean, that was amazing when you sent me that document. And I had a few people come in and go,
00:25:19
Speaker
Where's that from? Like Sean Rash, you know, he missed the documents himself. Didn't didn't recognize it. And so, yeah, impressive. There's a whole bunch of CIA documents that they're holding back. You know, they've released lots and you can get them all on a CD. There's several hundred that are still classified. And I think this is one of them. But I managed to maybe because of my connection with Gerald Haynes, he persuaded his superiors to let me have this one.
00:25:49
Speaker
And when did you get this, sorry? What year? I think it's on the... Oh yeah, approved for release. Yeah. That's pretty incredible. So one thing you did just mention was the newspaper. Yeah. So just, I mean, just, just to mention that the reason I think that is definitely a reference to Topcliffe, even though he refers to it as being two or three days ago, it can't be.
00:26:16
Speaker
Because the only big story that got massive coverage is the top clip case. You can have a look at some of the headlines now, but it got massive coverage. Could it be that he wrote that memo and it just didn't get put out until December and it just sat on a desk for a couple of months? Could be something as simple as that.
00:26:39
Speaker
But don't forget, this is 1952. I mean, because we live in the age where social media people are reading the same message instantaneously across the world, things took a long time.
UFOs in 1950s Media and Intelligence Files
00:26:51
Speaker
News took a long time to reach far-flung destinations, even between the UK and the USA. I mean, this is the sort of coverage this sighting got at the time. As you can see, this is the Yorkshire Evening Press, which I think is the York newspaper, evening newspaper.
00:27:09
Speaker
Can you imagine a UFO story making the front page of a newspaper like that today? This is the difference from 70 years ago, treated in a serious way as well, not as entertainment, but as a serious sort of thing that people should pay attention to and take seriously.
00:27:26
Speaker
Yeah, the good thing here is, this is before they started saying, they put out all the sort of things to military personnel saying, if you see something in the sky that you can't identify, do not under any circumstances talk to the press. That's something that was imposed by DDI security in I think the end of 1953.
00:27:49
Speaker
In 1952 there was no security blackout. If, for example, you were RAF or Royal Navy and you saw something and you happened to speak to someone from the media, it got into the papers.
00:28:05
Speaker
As this one did and this is what and that cia memo is referring to in terms of like dr. Jones being upset Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah, they didn't want they didn't want people to think our own and Personnel our test pilots how a naval personnel are seeing these things Because they were trying to sort of make out that they were all sort of optical illusions and misidentifications an awful lot of them were um, but
00:28:34
Speaker
like today they were very very sensitive about um military personnel talking to the media about things that seem that couldn't be identified hmm absolutely i mean this has got they've obviously interviewed flight like flight lieutenant john kilburn as well they have happily given statements to them so that's i don't think there's another cutting because there's a picture of all the the group all all sorts of sat around here we go yeah i don't really you can see that you just pull that up yeah you can see the whole bunch of them
00:29:05
Speaker
All sat round and you can see them talking to a journalist. Can you imagine that happening today immediately after a UFO sighting? It's the front page story of the Sunday dispatch, which was like the equivalent of them, you know, like the Sunday mirror or the Sunday times today. And the Sunday dispatch, if you look at the back copies of it,
00:29:29
Speaker
as I've done in the newspaper library. Virtually every other week they had a front-page story on the latest UFO sightings. All through the 1950s. Really? That frequent? Yeah, very frequently. It was that people were talking about it. In pop culture as well, there were the American films about flying saucers that were really popular. The year before all this kicked off,
00:29:58
Speaker
1951 was the release of The Day the Earth Stood Still, you know, classic science fiction depicting, you know, it was, and that film was all about, you know, the Cold War, the nuclear tensions. And it was like, you know, here's the fact that we're about to destroy the planet and come to the attention of this ET civilization who'd sent this a misery.
00:30:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:37
Speaker
people watched it and they thought could this possibly be true and then when you get pilots seeing these things it's like well maybe maybe what was depicted in that film is true and you know maybe they are trying to sort of persuade us using films that you know that these things are real. Yeah just a little side question what was the the kind of public reporting like in the 50s
00:31:00
Speaker
in the UK for UFOs. Was there anything? Did you ever find anything in the UFO archives? Yeah well lots because there is a surviving file of the National Archives on Topcliffe. Unfortunately it's not the scientific intelligence file because they obviously did a really thorough investigation of it. The only fault file that survived is a file created by RAF Topcliffe itself
00:31:26
Speaker
which has got Kilburn's report, which you've just seen. And there's a covering letter from the commanding officer. And what he's doing is saying, we've already sent you our file on the military sighting, which hasn't survived. The only thing that survived is this file that's got like a load of letters from members of the public who'd seen those stories in the newspapers and wanted to tell the Air Ministry and the base that they'd seen things in the sky as well.
00:31:54
Speaker
So there's like a whole bunch of letters from people in the Yorkshire area, some from Wales talking about things they'd seen two or three years before, who'd written in and the base commander had basically gathered all these letters up and sent them to the Air Ministry in London. Now that file inexplicably has survived, whereas the previous report he'd sent to Air Ministry, which had got all the statements from all 10 of the witnesses, hasn't survived.
00:32:22
Speaker
neither has the DSI study that was that was obviously carried out because there's a there's a I'm going to cut in here from the Yorkshire Evening Post you might be able to see that yeah that's in November or December and the Yorkshire Evening Post had gone back to the Air Ministry and said you know we know you're doing an investigation what's the result and three months later they said we can't explain it
00:32:47
Speaker
We've interviewed all the witnesses and intriguingly enough in here It actually mentions that as well as being seen from the ground It was seen by pilots of two aircraft in the air which is as far as i'm aware has never been part Of um, this this case in ufology because it clearly was also seen From the air as well And if you think about it the what they actually saw from the ground Was an object that seemed to be following a meteor jet coming into land at dishworth. So my question is
00:33:17
Speaker
Did the pilot of the meteor see anything? And it seems that he did, or cheated, whoever was flying the aircraft, and possibly the pilot of another aircraft as well may have seen something. And also, was it seen on radar? Was it seen on, there would have been some kind of ground control radar covering that area. And if, this might be the time to introduce the DI-55 document from 1967 that I found,
00:33:46
Speaker
Yeah, that was certainly interesting. We can dig that out. Got it. Here we go. So we've said that a lot of these early files have been destroyed. Now, this document, which I found, I think around 2000, 2001, this is from a file from 1967. And by 1967, the Air Ministry no longer existed because they got rid of the Air Ministry, the Admiralty and the
00:34:13
Speaker
military intelligence and they all merged into the MOD in the 1960s and that's where DI-55 then became responsible for UFOs. So they took over from the Air Ministry intelligence section that used to, back in the 1950s, keep tabs on these things. So it's interesting, there was a big flap of sightings in 1967 and this chap, John Dickinson, who was the DI-55C
00:34:38
Speaker
was his designation. So he was the Di-55 defense intelligence scientist he was based at Farnborough, interestingly, who was responsible for UFOs. And he went out during 1967 and did field investigations.
00:34:53
Speaker
of about at least half a dozen sightings. He actually had a car and spent a lot of his time working on this subject and all his papers survived, or quite a few of them anyway, including this one. So as you can see, despite the fact that they were telling people that the files from the 1950s had been destroyed, he obviously had access to them.
00:35:15
Speaker
in 1967 you can see the date on there 13th December 1967 someone had obviously asked him to go and dig out some of these old files and he said he says there that he'd managed to find all but two
00:35:30
Speaker
Of the intelligence files are new first for that for that period 1951 to 52 which at that time they were telling members of the public Had been destroyed. So I think this is a good reason to doubt What were sometimes told that these files no longer exist because they certainly existed in 1967 and he'd seen them So as you can see he says the files examined indicate that the top cliff meteor incident which occurred during the nato exercise main brace
00:35:57
Speaker
was typical of reports about such aircraft at the time. Now I've never been able to work out what he meant by that. Does he mean to do with meteor aircraft or to do with the UFO as an aircraft? I'd say the UFOs or the objects, but it's a very strangely word, isn't it? It is, it is, isn't it? Yeah, so because he then talks about the meteor being extensively operated in a variety of roles. So he's obviously talking about the meteor jet.
00:36:26
Speaker
But then, I think the next paragraph is the key one because he says, as regards the particular incident, the object in inverted commas only appeared to come from the aircraft. There is no specific evidence in the files examined so far that the object tracked or came from the aircraft. In fact, the trajectory of the apparent object was not established in absolute terms and thus typical questions such as true range.
00:36:52
Speaker
have not been answered now that suggests to me they've done a pretty thorough investigation possibly involving radar tracing of the object um where are those files that he's referring to as they clearly existed in 1967 and it's clear that they weren't able to identify whatever it was that had intruded on this massive need to exercise. He says that he says the the object only appeared to come from the aircraft and we've heard the witnesses saying that the
00:37:23
Speaker
they first noticed the objects at a lot higher altitude than the meteor, and performing in ways that would not just be a piece of fuselage or something falling out of the sky if it shot off. So, yeah, how much of that is based on... well, he's missing out points, basically, from what I gather. I just wish you could see whatever documents that he was basing that on, because there's obviously such a lot of stuff that did want to exist,
00:37:53
Speaker
which has either been lost or it's been put somewhere where he can never be found. I mean, one of the things is a lot of these files, if they've not been destroyed, have quite possibly been given to or safekeeping to some kind of private contractor outside freedom of information so that they can just bypass freedom of information requests and you're never going to get to see it.
Significance of 1952 UFO Patterns
00:38:14
Speaker
And the thing is, the amount of times that we've come across that, if they all do exist, there is a treasure trove somewhere. Yeah. Covering decades, decades and decades. But how do you prove that? Well, that's the thing. We just need a nice source to step forward. Anybody watching? You never know. Yeah. So this is all adding up to why I think this
00:38:39
Speaker
Not this sighting, the top clip thing in itself is really interesting, but there was a whole bunch of other sightings around the same time. I don't know if you want to introduce the one at Little Rissington, which happened in October 1952, a month later. Absolutely. The Swinney Crofts case. Yeah, Michael Swinney and David Crofts. Absolutely. Yeah, sorry, go on. Did you want to play the audio? This is an interview I did with Michael Swinney back in 2001.
00:39:10
Speaker
He was a meteor, he trained students on flying meteors and they were, in this particular case, October 1952, he got a student with him who was a Royal Navy lieutenant, who again I interviewed, he was told quite an incredible story. So he was sat behind me in the cockpit of the meteor, they'd lifted off from this training airbase called Little Rissington,
00:39:37
Speaker
in Gloucestershire and I think they got to about 5,000 feet they just burst through this sort of cloud cover and looked up and I'm going to use a prop now I've been drinking from this glass of wine and the way he described it to me looked up and he could see you can imagine the bottom the base of this glass of wine that sort of shape you can see that moving in the wrong direction
00:40:04
Speaker
that's how he described it looked and he could see and he said it was like shining and iridescent like the bottom of the of the wine glass and there was three of them in in a sort of an echelon sort of formation above him as he as he broke through the clouds
00:40:22
Speaker
And he turned around and said to David Crofts, is your oxygen on? Have you forgot to turn the oxygen on? Because he thought he was hallucinating when he saw these things. And he said, Yeah, well, we tested it before we saw off David. Yeah, it's fine. It's a book. Can you see those things in front of you that I can see? And of course, David Croft behind him said, Yeah, I can see them too. And it was like the radio down to
00:40:47
Speaker
ground control to say we've got three objects above us, what should we do? And they were just absolutely stunned. And according to the story, the contacted fighter command, the scrambled fighters from I think from Tanglia in Sussex. So you can imagine these fighters hurtling towards Gloucestershire to intercept these objects.
00:41:13
Speaker
and they also picked them up on radar at Gloucester air traffic control Gloucester is also an amazing incident and it was only by accident that I got to speak to both Michael Sweeney and David Crofts when they were still with us both and certainly Michael Sweeney's no longer with us and he told the story just incredibly well so if you want to play your
00:41:37
Speaker
the audio section. Yeah, I will just caveat that you did actually send me two files of interviews, which were quite lengthy. So I've just pulled five minutes out to play now. But if anybody is interested in listening to the whole things, if you go into the description of the video, there's a link to a Google Drive where you can just download the full things. But let's bring this five minutes up. And I think I captured the best
00:42:03
Speaker
five minutes so that image I just put on so we didn't have a blank screen so ignore that. Let me know in the chat if you can hear this as well because I don't want to play it if you can't. Oh there we go. Yeah I've just realized actually over the two recordings I sent you that was a BBC interview
00:42:26
Speaker
the right
00:42:53
Speaker
Yeah, so sorry about the slight technical issues there, guys. What I'm going to do after the live stream end is I'm going to add that five minute clip to the Google Drive where the full length ones are so you don't have to search that out if you wanted to hear. If you missed the start because I was playing it quite faint, I'll just add that to the folder so you can grab that five minute one as well.
00:43:13
Speaker
the joys of live streaming. We don't always get it right. So thank you for your patience, everyone. So, yeah, I mean, that was incredible. It's always incredible to hear it from them, isn't it? Directly, you can hear the tone of their voice and, you know, they're getting questioned about could you have been mistaken? Yes, I just find it incredible.
00:43:34
Speaker
Yeah, and you know, we were saying about the the top cliff story got into the media, but it really is just hit and miss what gets it reported and what didn't because the Little Riskington case, which is even more spectacular, the one we've just been listening to, didn't get into the media. So that came that we actually got to hear about that in 1998, I think it was when Peter Horsley, who was the equity for Prince Philip,
00:44:02
Speaker
the Duke of Edinburgh who everyone will know had an interest in the UFOs. He wrote a book all about his life and in it there's a chapter on the time that he investigated flying saucers for Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace and he talked about the case in that book and that was the first time anyone had heard about it so when I interviewed Peter Horsley
00:44:26
Speaker
He gave me the full details about it and said, you need to speak to Mick Swinnick. So that's how I tracked down Mick Swinnick, because no one had heard about this case. Fortunately, Mick was still alive and very articulate, wanted to talk about it. And around that sort of time, 2000, 2001, I got to speak to all these incredible people, including Stan Hubbard.
00:44:46
Speaker
and he's the guy who's the test pilot that we saw right at the beginning and perhaps this is where the most bizarre thing of all that we were talking about before the program I should mention that Stan Hubbard who was one of the RAF's top test pilots at the time who saw had like a very close encounter with
00:45:08
Speaker
Effectively a flying saucer and we can show you the drawing he made of what he saw or the artist's impression of it. This is the guy you saw This thing on the airfield at Farnborough in 1950 Now I've got two images haven't I've got the one that he did the black and white one, but then I've got that color one which one yeah Well just show both because there's the black and white drawing that he did for class van in of UFO Sweden
00:45:33
Speaker
Yeah, that's, that's, I mean, what he saw again, similar to the object that was seen at Topcliffe, like a discus shape. That's how the way he described it to me was almost like, you know, back in the 1950s, when we had sports events at school, and people used to throw like an old fashioned discus, you know, like in the Olympic games, bit like that. This thing sort of approached him broad daylight. He was standing on the airfield at Farnborough, the Royal Aircraft establishment of this thing. It was like,
00:46:01
Speaker
it was like, what did he describe it like? Well, as he says, they're like a mother of pearl. And it was sort of moving like this, or in a weird sort of way, again, similar to how the object at top cliff was described, you know, like drop like a falling leaf, which is not how mechanical aircraft behave. And yet, this is how this object was behaving.
00:46:23
Speaker
And he saw it again several weeks later when they were waiting for Wimpy Wade who was one of the RAF's top test pilots to come into land. And this time he was with a whole bunch of RAF officers, some quite senior people.
00:46:36
Speaker
and he said it was pandemonium because they were all running around trying to get binoculars and this thing was like zooming around in the sky and his story was featured in the flying saucer working party report which was the thing that was seen by Winston Churchill. Now the really bizarre thing about this was I didn't realize this until a few weeks ago when I started putting the notes together for this program
00:47:00
Speaker
It turns out, you know, I mentioned the 20th of September, 1952 was the 12th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. Now, Stan Hubbard was in Yorkshire. He was in 92 Squadron and he was leading some of these displays flying meteors for the Battle of Britain display on the very day that the top cliff incident happened.
00:47:27
Speaker
Now don't you think that is a bizarre coincidence that he's the guy who saw this flying saucer two years earlier, two occasions, and the days in Yorkshire flying around in the same vicinity for the Battle of Britain day, something very similar appears in the sky over RAF Tocqueville. Now is that the case
00:47:49
Speaker
that, you know, there's something about Stan Hubbard that attracted flying saucers, or is it a complete coincidence? But to me, I just find that absolutely baffling and mind blowing. And I was still around and I could ask him about it because he didn't occur to me at the time I interviewed him to ask him about this. He must have known about it. Yeah, absolutely. You'd think that's that is an incredible
00:48:14
Speaker
coincidence, if that's the case. But then, yeah, I mean, we have heard many people over the many years talk about certain people do attract these kind of things. I mean, yeah, it's incredible. And I'm just going to move on to this other image. So let me just that that's that's the cockpit. So this one. Yeah. Yeah.
00:48:34
Speaker
Is it Andreas Holsson that did the, this is an artist's impression that was done for the UFO Sweden group? Richard Svensson. Oh Richard Svensson, yeah. Which I think is quite a good depiction of what Stan Hubbard said he saw. So this thing, this is approaching the airfield and he actually, he was standing on Farnborough airfield for anyone who's been there for the Farnborough air display. Oh yes. This is early one August morning.
00:48:59
Speaker
clear sky there was only him there and he got sunglasses on he said and he said he saw this thing come towards him he took his sunglasses off thinking am i hallucinating and he said he approached him and he was like spinning round and he could eat could he smell um
00:49:15
Speaker
ozone coming from it and like this fizzing sort of like a huge electric power station he could hear this fizzing noise coming from it and he just zoomed off into the distance and he said it was definitely something not made on this earth the only way he could describe it and I do think his story is probably
00:49:38
Speaker
one of the most convincing I've ever heard. I mean, I'm a skeptic about these things, but I can't explain it. And then whatever it was came back in September of that year and then put on this amazing aerobatic display in front of the control tower in full view of all these RAF officials. And I think that must be what Marshall Chadwell is referring to in his memo, because he talks about a lot of RAF officials seeing this thing. And I think he's got that mixed up with top cliffs somehow.
00:50:08
Speaker
So he's combining these two stories. But there does seem to be a link between what Stan Hubbard saw in 1950 and the Topcliffe incident. Absolutely. And you mentioned there about yourself being a skeptic. I think that's one thing that I really want to make a point of is that if
Conclusion and Future Discussions
00:50:26
Speaker
We've talked about these cases just today. We talked about the Bentwaters Lake and Heath on a previous show. And you admittedly, there is no way of explaining these things from a skeptical point of view. So, I mean, I'm sure there will be some debunkers out there who will have a field day with these kind of cases. But, you know, this is why I think these cases, A, are really important and B, they almost seem like they're going to be forgotten about if we don't keep talking about them and presenting them.
00:50:53
Speaker
because they do have relevance and they bear resemblance to a lot of cases that we see in modern times. I think that's why these are so important.
00:51:03
Speaker
Yeah, I just, yeah, is there anything else? Are we missing anything? Yeah, because Ed Ruppel was Captain Ed Ruppel of the US Air Force. He was the head of Project Blue Book at the time. This is during the period when there was all these Washington sightings of that. I just think it's interesting just to mention what he says about areas. And he wrote this book
00:51:29
Speaker
It's effectively his memoir of his time on Project Blue Book in 1950s. This was published in 1956. And he actually talks about the top cliff incident in there. And he says that I don't know whether there's any significance in this, but just just to quote him, he says that before main brace, he said that someone in the Pentagon had half seriously mentioned that naval intelligence should keep an eye out for UFOs during Operation Main Brace.
00:51:59
Speaker
He didn't know whether this guy was joking or not, but it is an intriguing little anecdote, almost as if they were putting on a demonstration, whether it's the CIA that was putting on the demonstration or not, we don't know, but there was, I mean, we talked about Topcliffe, but there was
00:52:16
Speaker
at least two or three sightings from the ships as well. The US aircraft carrier Franklin Roosevelt, there were some photographs taken of something that had been seen in the sky from the aircraft carrier as well, which had never been published, which I think are in the blue book file somewhere. But he says in his book that he talks about the top cliff
00:52:38
Speaker
case and it says, classic line, it was these sightings, i.e. Topcliff, I was told by an RAF exchange intelligence officer
00:52:48
Speaker
in the Pentagon that caused the RAF, the Royal Air Force to officially recognize the UFO. So that was 70 years ago, the 70th anniversary. So effectively, all the sorts of military interest in this subject in the UK stems from these incidents that we've been talking about tonight. And that's why I think they're so important. And you know, it's the 70th anniversary.
00:53:11
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I always learn so much when we, you know, we, we talk about these cases for weeks before we do the show and I, you know, you send me the documents and then I go and do some digging and they are, they're just absolutely fascinating. So, you know, I really do appreciate them. Um, so yeah, I think that's probably it. One thing I will say, which, uh, you know, I'd like you to come back and we'll continue doing this, but I think before we touch upon any of the cases, I think the next show we do together should really be looking at the Condign Report.
00:53:40
Speaker
Yeah, it should really because I don't think I've not seen an in-depth analysis breakdown because you know you
00:53:48
Speaker
you were the one that got the whole thing released. So, you know, we got that aspect of the story and then, you know, I'm sure you know it inside out as well. And also what potentially is missing from it or what's redacted in it, you know, some good guesses or estimates as to what it could be. So, you know, maybe in a month or in a few weeks time, we can do that show. Yeah, there's a lot in that report, as you know.
00:54:11
Speaker
the
00:54:26
Speaker
Yeah, we'll get into that as well. So yeah, well, listen, David, as always, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And yeah, everyone in the live chat, I hope you enjoyed it, even with a small slight technical hitch there, but I will add the five minute video to the Google drive, which is linked below for all the audio from the, the Swinney Croft case. Yeah. I'm going to be back next week. Uh, go and follow my social medias to find out all the dates and times for my upcoming shows.
00:54:56
Speaker
I think that covers everything, so yeah. Thanks for inviting me on and I hope you've all enjoyed it. Yep. Thanks guys. See you soon. Take care. Goodbye.